…as I am Torontoist’s official accredited journalist (well, one of two, but I do the writing bits) covering the G20 summit here in Toronto (motto: “When We Have An Economic Summit, We Have Earthquakes And Tornadoes Just To Make The Fucking Point”). Needless to say, this is totally awesome and I hope I get the opportunity to do Jello shots with Paul Krugman, but it also means I am basically not here for the next four days.

So head over to Torontoist and follow along with all the world summit skinny and, presumably, the eventual massive riots.

Y’know, I had no particular problem with the G20, a large and expensive but so far as I could tell relatively well-intentioned and mostly harmless summit. At least, not until we started into the ‘special arrest powers’ and suchlike.

I suspect that the hugely heightened security will be a galvanizing factor in this matter; even those who had no intention of protesting to begin with may begin to consider doing so because they can be arrested for simply walking too close to a security checkpoint. Is it just me, or is this getting out of hand?

When the G20 was in PGH last year, it was weird just walking around and taking pictures of the scenery. You should take efforts to take pictures of some of the installed fortifications (chain link walls, etc) and then take a post-G20 picture from the exact same spot.